Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence Elizabeth A. Kensinger Boston College ABSTRACT—There have been extensive discussions about whether emotional memories contain more accurate detail than nonemotional memories do, or whether individuals simply believe that they have remembered emotional ex- periences more accurately. I review evidence that negative emotion enhances not only the subjective vividness of a memory but also the likelihood of remembering some (but not all) event details. I then describe neuroimaging evi- dence suggesting that engagement of emotion-processing regions (particularly the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) relates to the encoding and retrieval of details in- trinsically linked to negative items. KEYWORDS—affect; amygdala; fMRI; memory distortion People experience many events that elicit emotional reactions: They greet loved ones at the airport, visit sick children at the hospital, and attend friends’ weddings. Such events often are remembered vividly, and for a while researchers believed that these emotional memories might be immune to disruption (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Over the past 30 years, research has demonstrated convincingly that emotional memories are not impervious to forgetting or distortion. However, whether emotion enhances the detail with which information is remembered or whether emotion simply biases a person to believe that they have retained a vivid memory continues to be debated. This issue is of central importance for characterizing emotion’s mnemonic influences. Suggestive evidence for people’s inflated confidence in emo- tional memories has come from studies asking participants to distinguish old (studied) from new (nonstudied) items and also to indicate whether they vividly remember something specific about the old items or simply know those items had been pre- sented previously (Yonelinas, 2002). Emotional and nonemo- tional items sometimes are judged as old with equal accuracy, but emotional items are more likely to be judged to be remem- bered and not just known (Ochsner, 2000). This pattern could signify participants’ inflated confidence for emotional memories: Participants believe they remember the emotional items’ details, but there is nothing about their recognition-memory accuracy to suggest that they actually do remember the emotional informa- tion with more detail. However, such a pattern could also arise if emotion influenced the amount of detail remembered about each item but not the number of items remembered: Although par- ticipants are equally likely to remember emotional and non- emotional items, perhaps they remember emotional items with additional detail. To differentiate these alternative explanations, my colleagues and I (Kensinger, Garoff-Eaton, & Schacter, 2006) compared the effects of emotion on memory for general item features with emotion’s effects on memory for specific item details. After viewing negative and neutral objects (Fig. 1A), participants indicated whether items were identical to ones they had studied (same), shared the same verbal label but not the same visual details as a studied object (similar), or were unrelated to any studied object (new; Fig. 1B). This design could separate a person’s memory for a general type of item (calling a same item ‘‘same’’ or ‘‘similar’’ rather than ‘‘new’’) from their memory for the exact visual details of an item (calling a same item ‘‘same’’). Participants were more likely to remember the visual details of negative items compared with those of neutral items (Fig. 1C; red portion of bars). Importantly, this mnemonic enhancement for visual detail occurred even when there was no effect of emotion on the ability to recognize that a particular item type had been studied (Fig. 1C; total height of bars). In other words, emotion affected the likelihood that details were remembered about a studied item but did not affect the overall proportion of items remembered. These findings converge with other evidence to suggest that, although emotional experiences are not remem- Address correspondence to Elizabeth Kensinger, Department of Psychology, Boston College, McGuinn 510, 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467; e-mail: elizabeth.kensinger@bc.edu. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 16—Number 4 213 Copyright r 2007 Association for Psychological Science